When you're on the right, you campaign against wokeness without any difficulty. It's logical, and even fair game: the excesses of certain activists allow them to ridicule in public, by amalgamation, all progressive ideas. Nonsense for conservatives...
But when you're on the left? Let's be honest: things get complicated. Tactically, you're adding your voice to a camp whose ideas you don't share in any way. Risk of confusion. And basically, you're attacking a movement that thrives, among other things, because of the very real discrimination that affects certain "visible minorities", or, for example, because of the injustices and violence done to women by the ambient machismo. By denouncing this "woke" militancy, even for good reasons, you risk underestimating the righteous anger of the victims of racism or sexism, which is obviously not the intended goal.
There is a solution to this dilemma: to show that there is no need to subscribe to theories that we disapprove of in order to fight against the injustices that feed on them. Let us leave aside the term "woke", which has been appropriated by the right and is the source of summary and confused denunciations. Let us distinguish the different branches of this new militancy. We can see, therefore, that the good old universalism stemming from the Enlightenment provides a solid and sufficient philosophical basis for the fight against evils that have been rightly denounced. On condition that we draw all the consequences from it.
Should we adopt decolonial theses to fight against this racism partly inherited from colonialism? No: even if these studies reveal real affiliations, force us to revise the reading of history, to change the way the West looks at its own responsibility, they have the immense flaw of confining minorities to an eternal victim posture, of dangerously racializing relations between citizens, of fueling a community - or communitarian - vision of social relations in the Republic. Whereas the principle of equality, if it is pushed to all its consequences, if it goes beyond simple equality of rights to concern itself with equality of conditions, is enough to found the fight. Yes, minorities, despite the progress made, are still oppressed: it is the duty of every consistent republican to make them the object of a constant and stubborn political struggle. No "wokism" is useful for this reflection.
The same goes for feminist struggles. The principle of equality condemns all discrimination in salaries, all undue differences in careers. It calls into question, in particular, the unequal sharing of household tasks and allows for the unwavering sanctioning of any violence against women. There is no need to introduce, on questionable theoretical bases, an essential divide between feminism and "neo-feminism", between classical feminism and intersectionality. It is the same struggle for equality that continues, applied to objects that have hitherto been less taken into account and which is entering a new stage.
The same goes, finally, for academic work. Gender studies, decolonial studies, reflections on the domination that is surreptitiously exercised, on a daily basis, against certain categories or groups, all have their place in research and teaching. But there is no need, in this matter, to reject other schools of thought, unless we want to impose on academics a new doxa, introduced with bans and cancellations, perfectly contrary to the universal rules of free thought. Freedom of research and teaching, a principle independent of the ideological orientations that coexist at the university, assures new schools their place in the sun. The rest is censorship, aggression, intellectual tyranny, all things that the principled independence of criticism and knowledge radically proscribe.
This is how the left must react, whose role is to ensure, in social reality, the application of the universal principles of reason, freedom and equality. To abandon this point of view is to join the dogmatism of the new censors and the sectarianism of the extremes.
